Joe Sanberg/Wikimedia Commons
Clean or filthy rich?
News that Joe Sanberg – he of the slogan proclaiming “Clean Rich is the New Filthy Rich” – is now caught up in a scandal swirling around “green investor” Ibrahim Ameen Alhusseini has brought back a lot of interesting memories of my time in Alice’s Alaska Wonderland.
The Alice involved here would, of course, be one Alice Rogoff who financed an attention-getting, online news website before buying a newspaper, a product printed on a highly flammable material, with which she self-immolated.
Those unfamiliar with Rogoff’s Alaska saga, a made-for-reality TV affair if ever there was one – should note the reference to self-immolation is figurative, not real. Alice didn’t actually set herself aflame. She merely bankrupted the state’s largest newspaper and with it her reputation.
This was something impossible to foresee in the early 2010s when she arrived in the north fleeing that more southerly part of North America that Alaskans call “Outside.”
Back in her old, Outside home in Bethesda, Maryland, Rogoff was the socialite wife of David Rubenstein, one of the country’s masters of money. He co-founded The Carlyle Group, an equity investment firm, the profits from which turned him into one of America’s richest men.
Alice lived there in his shadow as Mrs. Rubenstein. In Alaska, she could shine in the role of a high profile, end-of-the-roader with money, lots of money, and important contacts in the worlds of both finance and politics.
As part of a negotiated split from Rubenstein, she’d signed a marital separation agreement that guaranteed a $5 million per year allowance, and she’d spent a lifetime cultivating a long list of influencers.
On a tour of Alaska in 2015, President Barack Obama took time to visit Alice’s lakeside Anchorage home and parlay with Alice’s Alaska contacts. A classic extrovert, Alice was all about contacts.
Growing up as the son that Mortimer Rogoff never had, she was immersed in the world of the business of business from an early age. An electronics genius, Mortimer was from 1963 to 1968 the head of European operations for ITT, the company founded as International Telephone & Telegraph.
By the 1950s, ITT had grown to include all kinds of other businesses and become one of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies. By the mid-’60s, the company was so big and considered so powerful that the U.S. Justice Department moved to block its effort to purchase the ABC television network because of fears it might attempt to block technological changes that could threaten network television.
Mortimer was deep into the tech that might help do this. In his obituary in 2008, the Washington Post wrote that he “invented technologies that helped make possible the development of GPS navigation systems and cellular telephones.”
Alice grew up around all of this while attending the American School of Paris in the mid- to late-1960s. It was a heady time that would leave her forever valuing the importance of contacts, and her circle of influence would only grow during her studies at Harvard University in the late 1970s, her stint as an assistant to Donald E. Graham, publisher of The Post that followed and her 1983 marriage to Rubenstein.
Rubenstein was then working as an attorney in the nation’s capital, having just left the Carter administration where he served as a deputy assistant to the President for domestic affairs and policy. It would be five years until he started Carlyle and became a wheeler and dealer in the world of finance, but the Rubensteins were already making big connections.
Enter Joe Sanberg
Sanberg would eventually enter Alice’s Alaska Wonderland thanks to his connections. At Alice’s home on the shore of Anchorage’s Campbell Lake, he was one evening introduced to me as a college friend of Gabrielle “Ellie” Rubenstein, one of the Rubensteins’ three children.
Sanberg almost immediately started explained a well-intentioned plan he had to make the poor wealthier by turning their pennies into dimes. I couldn’t tell if he was a con artist, of whom Alice attracted more than a few in those days, or someone who truly believed he could make money, maybe even get rich, by doing good deeds.
All of this was back in the days of “good” Alice when she was the money behind the online, start-up news organization Alaska Dispatch then offering an alternative to the state’s California-owned Anchorage Daily News (ADN) – far and away the most powerful and influential news organization north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the time.
Not to go too memoir-ish here, but these were good times fueled by the crazy and entrepreneurial people – some seemingly crooked or marginally so, some not – that Alice attracted and the adrenaline of the news competition. As the upstart news organization challenging the then-mighty ADN, the Dispatch reminded me of the ADN itself when I joined its battle to challenge the mighty Anchorage Times at the start of the 1980s.
That ADN was full of journalists with good intentions and so too the Dispatch, notable among them the original cofounders Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne who were out to prove that it was possible to create a self-supporting, internet news organization in a world where the internet was crippling once filthy rich newspapers on the way to tearing them down.
Rogoff, at the start, seemed of like mind, but personal desires for power and influence – and her access to wealth – would eventually lead her to buy the Daily News at a hugely inflated price, and her fundamental lack of understanding of how to actually run a business would cause her to steer the newspaper into bankruptcy and leave her with a badly tarnished reputation.
Ellie would fare somewhat better. She would become an Alaska co-chairman for the first Presidential campaign of Donald Trump when no one thought he had a chance of being elected president, and later use her political and business contacts to maneuver her way into position as a trustee on the board of the nearly $81 billion Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation before resigning after an uproar as to false claims about her bona fides and accusations of conflicts of interest involving her father.
Such conflicts seemed to run in the family in Alaska. Alice was in 2014 accused of using her newspaper to get an old friend, the late Democrat Byron Mallott, and a new friend, Republican Bill Walker, elected as the lieutenant governor and governor of Alaska on a “unity” ticket.
Fagan overstated, but there were kernels of truth there. Alice did play a major role in putting together the ticket; there were a fair number of stories written about incumbent Gov. Sean Parnell’s fumbled handling of the Guard investigation; and there was some other pre-election hanky-panky at the newspaper, including Alice spiking a Parnell-paid-for-ad that was supposed to appear in the paper just before election day.
And, post-election, Rogoff became a key adviser to the governor, though the newspaper she owned reported very, very little of this, including her role in trying to help Walker broker a deal to build a natural gas pipeline to sell cheap liquified natural gas (LNG) to the Chinese communists.
Alice and an Artic-development-minded buddy, one-time Iceland president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, had been courting the Chinese for years. Iceland signed a free trade agreement with China in April 2013, and at an “Arctic Circle” meeting he and Alice hosted that same month in Reykjavik he explained “that China is fast becoming the preeminent trading country in the world in the 21st century. It’s only logical they should prepare themselves for the shortest route between China and Europe and America, in the same way as our countries used the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal in the beginning of the 20th century.”
This was Alice the visionary who’d spent a fair amount of time traveling around rural Alaska before signing on as the Dispatch financier and there recognizing the lack of an economy causing so much dysfunction.
It’s not a given that people who are out of work get into trouble, but a 2022 Rand Corporation study found that in this country, “by age 35, 64 percent of unemployed men have been arrested and 46 percent have been convicted of a crime, with the rates varying only slightly by race and ethnicity.”
Though not exactly a scholar, Alice instinctively understood this and early in her Alaska tenure focused heavily on the state’s need for economic development. There she reached the high water mark of her 49th state tenure.
Largely thanks to her and, of course, Rubenstein, Gov. Walker got to fly home to Alaska on Air Force One with then-President Barack Obama in 2015, and later meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Anchorage.
In the wake of these meetings, Walker claimed to have a “multinational, multi-billion dollar purchase agreement, lending agreement, investment agreement” to build a natural gas pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope to tidewater with 75 percent of the gas earmarked for China.
A long-term commitment of such a large volume of U.S. natural gas to China was, however, never going to win the support of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) and without CIFUS support, Walker’s deal wasn’t going anywhere.
In retrospect, China might well have been playing Walker to get a better deal on gas from Russia. Only a year after Jinping’s Alaska meeting with Walker, China secured a 10 percent stake in Russia’s Yamal LNG project wand saw work on the Power of Siberia gasline connecting Russia and China well underway.
Walker and Walker-hired gas czar went on pitching the gasline as “challenged” but achievable in 2016, but by the fall of 2017, the Alaska dream of a gasline was once again dead.
Walker himself would shortly follow it into history, having served but one term as governor. And Alice’s newspaper would be in a freefall toward a 2020 bankruptcy that left newspaper suppliers holding the bag while her newspaper informed its readers that lawsuits filed as early as 2017 to force her to pay her bills were a common activity that goes on between businesses – wink, wink.
Rubenstein monitored this all from more than 3,300 miles away, and after Alice’s fall jumped in to pay off most of Alice’s debts as part of a divorce agreement. There was some speculation that he had hoped for the collapse to put Alice in a position where she’d settle for less than what she had always insisted was her half of the Rubenstein family fortune.
Details at to what she finally collected in the divorce settlement have never been revealed, but it was enough to finance another flight.
She left Anchorage (though she appears to still claim it as her ‘home’) to spend most of her time flitting between the U.S. East Coast and London where she became director of the Arctic Business Journal in 2022. Her fixation with the Arctic is a story in and of itself which those interested can read here: Queen of the Arctic.
Crazy land
If the end of Alice’s Alaska Wonderland was all yin, the beginning was all yang.
Of Alice’s years at the online-only Alaska Dispatch, I can personally only say that she rivaled the late ADN editor Howard Weaver as the best boss I ever worked for before becoming the worst boss I ever worked for, which is not to suggest Weaver was ever the worst.
He merely ceased to be the best after he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and latched onto an overpowering faith in self-improvement in the form of self-advancement. That was good for him.
Great for him in fact. He got healthier on many fronts. Lost a lot of weight. Started hiking. Focused on his career.
It was not necessarily good for the working class others of whom Weaver had long been a champion.
He remains a revered figure in Alaska journalism to this day though thought of quite differently Outside for helping McClatchy build a short-lived newspaper empire that collapsed and took a lot of people’s jobs down with it.
As McClathy’s vice-president for new, he was widely thought of as self-serving and arrogant.
McClatchy was by then trying to downsize an over-extended media empire that stemmed from the company’s $4.5 billion purchase of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in 2006. One newspaper analyst at the time described the purchase to the New York Times as “a dolphin swallowing a small whale,” given that McClatchy was a company generating less than half the revenue of Knight Ridder.
Nonetheless, Weaver – McClatchy’s boss for news – publicly expressed his faith the market would prove that McClatchy had made a great buy.
“When we say good journalism is good business, we also say that good business is good journalism,” he told the Sacramento News & Review in McClatchy’s hometown.
A very long, long time turned out to be 14 years. McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in 2020. By then, Weaver had been gone a long, long time. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, he jumped ship in 2008 at the age of 58. McClatchy stock was then already in free fall.
In fairness to Weaver, who had a good heart, this early departure almost surely had something to do with how he felt about how well he was being paid to help dismantle news operations. Even before he left Anchorage for the McClatchy home office, he was uncomfortable with his increasing wealth. I remember a revealing conversation around a lunchroom table at the ADN where a reporter was complaining about the burden of car maintenance costs.
Weaver chimed in that one of the great bennies of having a company car was that all those expenses were paid for before realizing what he’d said. That led to his explaining that he didn’t want the company car but “had” to accept it because it was an integral part of his “compensation package.” No one at the table said a word after that.
At McClatchy, Weaver took the cash from the bonuses McClatchy had given him and the savings from his $400,000 salary (the kind of earnings few journalists even imagine) and retired to his Redwing Ranch in the Sierra foothills to tend the fruit and olive orchards, write about his past experiences in Alaska, and later become a left-leaning Twitter pundit.
Howard’s Achilles heel was always his hubris. We all have our flaws.
For the most part, I was fortunate to see mainly the best of Weaver in Alaska. It was a different story with Alice, whose big flaw was narcissism at a Trumpesque level despite her protestations that she was a “Romney Republican,” whatever that meant.
Alice wanted to a be big, big player as an Alaska powerbroker. We parted ways after I discovered commercial fisherman Ronald Maw, a friend of Walker, claiming to be a resident of Alaska while spending much of his time in Montana, where he also claimed residency.
This happened just after Walker named Maw to the Alaska Board of Fisheries, the regulatory body that writes Alaska fishing regulations. Since it is illegal to claim to be a resident of two U.S. states at the same time, and since Montana was getting ready to charge Maw for claiming residency there to save a few bucks on a hunting license, Walker tried to cover everything up by ordering Maw to resign and then getting his friend Alice’s newspaper to write a story saying that “Kenai River fish wars have claimed another Fish Board nominee.
Then-ADN Managing Editor David Hulen knew this was a lie because he knew exactly what had happened to cause Maw’s resignation. I face-to-face told him of asking an Alaska State Trooper to check out indications that Maw was licensed to hunt as a resident in Alaska, and that Montana, upon finding out that Maw had obtained residents licenses in both Alaska and Montana, was about to charge Maw with making illegal claims in the latter state.
But Hulen, a self-described “survivor,” sanctioned reporter Pat Forgey’s misleading story with the full support of then-acting city editor Rich Mauer, the lead author on the National Guard stories that tarnished Parnell and helped Walker get elected.
It was obvious at that point that with Alaska Dispatch co-founder Tony Hopfinger transitioning out of the picture, Alice had a couple of yes-men firmly in place, had developed bigger concerns than running an honest newspaper, and that my days at the ADN were numbered, especially since I’d ignored an earlier Hulen directive to stop investigating Maw.
A buyout was negotiated, and I left. It was a sad moment, mainly because I’d had a lot of fun working for Alice, which brings this story back to Sandberg.
Party central
Through the Dispatch years, I regularly attended gatherings at Rogoff’s Campbell Lake home that attracted a wide variety of interesting characters from Grimsson to now former Greenland premier Kuupik Kleis to various Alaska Native leaders, and plenty of fast-talking operators like Sanberg.
It was an extremely entertaining time. Scott Woodham, an editor of the Dispatch News, once described Alice as the “Yosemite Sam” of the North, and the chaos that swirled around her was what one might expect from the “hootin’est, tootin’est, bobtail wildcat in the West” prone to firing off a pair of handguns to get attention.
I loved spending time with Alice. She had no shortage of ideas, many of them nonsensical but always entertaining. Sanberg seemed, by comparison, rather dull and pushing his good intentions a little too hard. But I admit to having been then and now an old-school journalist steeped in a healthy skepticism about all things.
It’s possible that Sandberg, one of the co-founders of both Aspiration.com and Pt Capital in which Alice had an interest, was just letting his own good intentions blind him to the fact that few people get rich by doing good deeds unless they happen to be building a business, or businesses, that provide a lot of good jobs. Aspiration and Pt Capital weren’t about building business. They were self-described innovative financial companies.
Federal court records reflect that Aspiration-linked Ibrahim AlHusseini has already been arrested and charged with securities fraud in connection with dealings that allegedly swindled investors out of $150 million.
“As a result of AlHusseini’s fraud,” the statement says. “Al Husseini received more than $12 million in personal gain, and Investor Fund B lost at least $150 million.”
The statement mentions no losses by Investor Fund A, and adds that one of the co-founders of that fund “serves on the board of directors of an entity that AlHusseini controls.” It further states that AlHusseini “served on the board of directors of company A.”
Whether the Aspiration co-founder on the AlHusseini board of directors is Sanberg or partner Andrei Cherny impossible to tell. Cherny is a politically well-connected member of the American left. He worked as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and is credited by the New York Times as the man in control of the 2000 Democratic Party platform Presidential candidate Al Gore took onto the campaign trail. After Gore, Cherny became the speech writer for John Kerrey during his 2004 campaign for the Democrat nomination for president.
Cherny might well have been in the crowd going through Alice’s Campbell Lakehouse in the Dispatch years, but I don’t remember ever meeting him.
Bloomberg first reported in July that investigators were probing Aspirations’ trade in carbon credit transactions. Bloomberg said then that the company “had turned a debit card designed for sustainable shopping and investment accounts that promised complete exclusion of fossil-fuel stocks into a high-flying climate startup,” but didn’t exactly explain how that worked.
There has been amazingly little reporting about the investigation since, or about AlHusseini’s arrest and subsequent release on $3 million bail.
The Daily Wire, which the website AllSides classifies as a hard-right news organization, was one of the few entities – mainstream or alternative – to pick up on the arrest. Rather predictably, its story led with an emphasis on AlHusseinni as a “a left-wing venture capitalist who invests in ‘climate-restoring technologies’ and donated more than $300,000 to Democrats.”
The story went on to describe him as the head of the ” investment firm FullCycle” and “a board member of CodePink, which stakes out the U.S. Capitol to harass lawmakers who support Israel and which calls the Gaza war the “US-Israel Holocaust.”
Sandberg entered the story as Cherny’s sidekick, “a California progressive activist who takes credit for California expanding a welfare program to illegal immigrants and reportedly considered running for president in 2020.
“According to civil and criminal court documents, Sanberg defaulted on a $145 million loan for which AlHusseini had promised to serve as a backstop,” the Wire reported. “An investment firm called Clover Private Credit Opportunities agreed to loan the money to Sanberg–or rather, to an LLC he controlled that in turn owned another LLC called Aspiration Holdings SPE. He put up 10 million shares of Aspiration Partners Inc., the financial services company, as collateral.”
It is unclear from the various legal filings whether Sanberg was a patsy or a participant in AlHusseinni’s wheelings and dealings, but the Wire did add that “Aspiration has been accused of distorting numbers to increase its profits while falling short of the progressive commitments it uses to lure customers.”
Suspicions on the left
Right-wing publications have not, however, been the only news organizations to question the business dealings of Aspiration.
The company, according to that story, claimed to have “5 million passionate members” when in reality its active customers numbered about a tenth of that, claimed to have planted 35 million trees when the number appeared to be about a third of that, and claimed to be running “a fossil-fuel-free (mutual) fund investing in sustainable businesses that are leaders in their industry” when, in fact, Aspiration was investing in “multiple companies that are either huge users of fossil fuels or are in the industry itself.”
Sanberg, for his part, wasn’t talking and still isn’t. Thus it’s impossible to know where and how exactly he fits in all of this.
“Tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrases that translates to mean “repairing the world.”
Sanberg’s time on Wall St. was spent at Blackstone Private Equity Group, a company now overseeing $1.1 trillion in assets, and Tiger Global Management, where Courthouse News described Sanberg as “a managing director” in a strange, 2014 story about his brother, Rick, trying to blackmail him online.
Sanberg has said that while at Global he earned more money than he will “ever be able to spend.” The Atlantic described him as “growing up poor, succeeding in business, (and) making millions on Wall Street” in a 2019 story that reported he was contemplating a run at the Democract nomination for the presidency.
Give him credit for thinking big with his good intentions. And in the mix of fast-talking, wheelers and dealers who passed through Rogoff’s Campbell Lake home in the early 2010s, he did seem to be one of those most sincere about doing something more than just making money.
Others not so much, among them Scott Borgerson, who founded CargoMetrics Technologies, a ship-tracking company reported to have raised $30.34 million in financing before its collapse in September of last year.
It was never clear what the company was offering of such value, and Borgerson was gone by the time it went under. He resigned in 2020 after his romantic connection to Ghislaine Maxwell, the one-time partner of and madam for financier Jeffrey Epstein, was revealed.
Maxwell was another friend of Alice’s who went through Anchorage.
I ran into Maxwell at a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she was pitching the “TerraMar Project” to save the world’s oceans. I distinctly remember the meeting because Alice dumped Maxwell on me and fled, leaving me to try my best to politely listen for too long as she droned on about what seemed a pure scam.
Her “nonprofit” project – TerraMar – was, according to TreeHugger.com, officially launched in 2014 “at the Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Conference in Monterey, Calif….to engage people with its interactive website, where visitors can claim a parcel of the ocean, ‘friend’ a marine species like green turtles or sea otters, take a virtual dive, or find educational projects for parents and teachers.”
Maxwell’s pitch in Iceland was for marine buoys in the Arctic that would help in forecasting weather in the Arctic as if anyone cared for a forecast for Russia’s uninhabited Anzhu Islands.
Her presentation, needless to say, ended with a call for “a digital currency for social good.” The TerraMar project, according to U.S. tax filings, collected $132,568 in donations from supporters in 2014 before fading away. Oh if only this website attracted such contributions, but journalism doesn’t pay.
Maxwell’s run did not, however, end well. She is now at the start of a 20-year prison term after being convicted of conspiring with Epstein, who committed suicide in jail in New York in 2019, to sexually abuse minors. England’s Daily Mail in March reported that Maxwell had just “escaped a violence-plagued prison wing nicknamed the ‘snake pit'” at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee.
“Bosses at FCI Tallahassee agreed to transfer the notorious madam out of the jail’s squalid B South unit where 120 inmates are crammed into tiny cubicles of four bunks,” the newspaper reported. Maxwell’s cushy new digs in D South – the so-called ‘honor dorm’ – are reserved for 30 to 40 of the low-security Florida lockup’s best-behaved prisoners.
“There are two bunks per cell but so few occupants that the disgraced British socialite, 62, is almost guaranteed to have her own room as well as four times the storage.”
Meanwhile, Borgerson, who according to the New York Times, first hooked up with Maxwell at the Rejavick Arctic conference in 2013 and later married her, is reported to have dumped Maxwell while she was in prison in much the way he left his previous wife and family for Maxwell in 2014.
Oh, the company Alice kept….
Among the missing
There are no reports of AlHusseini ever making it north to Alaska, but he would have fit right in at Alice’s house, where there was always more talk than action about doing business to do good, some of the talk possibly real, some of it probably not.
AlHusseini seems to have been made for this environment. Sustainatopia – a promoter of sustainability talkfests to promote social, financial and environmental good intentions – lists him on its speakers’ list as “a venture capitalist dedicated to financing companies that implement market-ready solutions to our greatest social and environmental challenges.
“Ibrahim is passionate about gender equality, education and the arts and serves on the boards of several national and international non-profits working to address these issues.”
I wish now on I’d pressed Sanberg more on how exactly all of this work for the good is really supposed to the poor instead of the people pushing the agenda, but I was being polite, a rare thing, given his introduction as a friend of Ellie, a young woman wrestling with having grown up in oversize shadow of her father.
And, to be fully honest, I was more interested at the time in Ellie’s effort to convince her mother and others to invest in a failing platinum mine near Goodnews Bay in Southwest Alaska that sounded like a sure loser, though Ellie imagined it would produce vast profits.
Pt Capital LLC, it is worth noting, first sprang to life in 2012 as Platinum Capital Advisors LLC, according to state corporate records. It was created with an eye to getting into the platinum mining business.
Alice, for her part, was all about mining before she wasn’t. After 2014 meetings with Tom Collier, a former chief of staff in the Department of the Interior newly named to take over as CEO of the controversial Pebble Mine, she lobbied me for weeks to do a story about how unfairly Pebble had been treated by federal regulatory authorities.
“I’m not expert enough on oil and gas matters to suggest which projects and policies meet that test and which do not. But, for example, take mining projects: Without changing state tax policy for mining (as the Alaska Mining Commission has even recommended), no mining project today yields much in the way of state revenue. Walker’s administration should work with the Legislature to factor mining into the state’s fiscal future in a meaningful way.”
She’d later change her view on mining, though why is unclear. I took the switch to be linked to her association with Walker and his connections to the Alaska commercial fishing business, which punches well above its size in Alaska politics, and is deadset against mining of any kind. But then again Alice was always been more than a little mercurial.
She changed her mind the way other people change clothes.
I do remember thinking she and Ellie were damn lucky they didn’t buy that platinum mine XS Platinum had picked it up for $50 million in 2007 only to five years later default on the loans used for the purchase. With the mine in default, Ellie figured it could be bought cheap, and platinum being an important metal in the tech industry around which today’s world revolves a lot of money could be made.
Alice’s Alaska adventure might have ended early if she and her daughter had invested there. Fortunately for her, the mine was still owned by XS when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused the mine operators of knowingly allowing a toxic soup of heavy metals, arsenic, cyanide and more to leach into the Salmon River.
A federal grand jury in Anchorage in 2014 delivered felony indictments against five company officers and employees, charging them with conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act and more. I remember Hopfinger, who was still trying to merge the Dispatch and the ADN, breathing a sigh of relief Alice hadn’t become tangled up in that mess.
Alice and Ellie had by then moved on. Ellie was back in school, and Alice was busy advising Walker on Alaska economic policy while in denial about the fact her prized possession, the ADN, was speeding toward bankruptcy with its reporters apparently ignorant of all of this or too cowardly to risk upsetting the boss by reporting it.
Making Alaska history
When Alice bought the Anchaorge newspaper, a Seattle newspaper headlined “Salmon Swallows Whale” in line with the earlier observations on the McClatchy purchase of Knight Ridder.
Thanks to her Rubenstein connections, the majority, co-owner of the online Alaska Dispatch managed to raise $34 million pay cash-starved McClatchy for a struggling newspaper only a year after the Boston Globe, a newspaper with a circulation eight to 10 times that of the ADN, had sold for only about twice that.
Alice’s “much” amounted to $14.5 million or less than half of the purchase price. She was still on the hook for $19.5 million or an even $20 million if you counted the $500,000 in free advertising she’d promised GCI as part of the deal.
The ADN was at the time reporting a daily circulation of 45,783, down from a claimed 57,622 only three years before as the internet took an ever-increasing tool on print news. In reality, the income-producing circulation was more like 40,000, but even using the 46,000 figure, the $20 million for which Alice was taking responsibility amounted to $434.78 per subscriber or about $150 per reader more than John Henry paid for the Globe the year before in a deal that was reported to deliver him almost $70 million worth of Boston-area real estate along with the newspaper.
Needless to say, the math on Alice’s ADN deal never looked good, but she had delusions of growing the newspaper’s circulation, cutting costs by downsizing the office space for the newspaper’s small army of journalists and advertising sales staff, and then finding a way to build a cheap plant in which to house a new printing press, the one once owned by McClatchy to be left behind in the old McClatchy-built fortress near Anchorage’s Merrill Field that she’d sold to GCI.
The new, “higher-quality printing press” would never run, but it would be the subject of much litigation after Alice refused to pay the people working to install it. The litigation only accelerated Alice’s march toward bankruptcy, and in the end, the only thing she accomplished as the owner of the ADN was to help her friends Mallott and Walker run state government for a few years.
Ellie arguably accomplished as much in becoming first the CEO of her own investment fund and then a Permanent Fund player.
“An avid angler, hunter, and pilot,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy would say when he in 2022 appointment to a four-year term on the board, “Rubenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Manna Tree, an investment firm dedicated to improving human health by transforming the food supply chain for healthier outcomes, and the founder of Mission: Ingredients, which supports outdoor wilderness, youth education, and military health and recovery programs.”
Manna Tree has a nice, Sanbergesque ring to it paralleling the Aspiration that in 2016 was described by LinkedIn as “a new age consumer financial service company that is helping to democratize wealth through its access to financial products that have historically only been available to the wealthy.”
Sanberg himself described Aspiration as “a consumer financial firm that brings the core banking account you need for everyday life and brings investment and retirement services and will eventually bring a whole suite of services for your life.
“We build trust-based relationship with you, by letting you pay what you think is fair and by delivering products that are objectively best in class in what our customers need and want.”
It is hard to read that last line as anything but nonsense, given that any financial institution truly committed to letting people “pay what you think is fair” is doomed to fail when cash-short clients decide the only “fair” payment is no payment.
But Sanberg could talk a good game as could Ellie until she talked her way into trouble. Her Trumpesque chattering in Saudi Arabia helped cost her the seat on the Permanent Fund board. At an October 2023 conference in the Middle East nation, she claimed to have created the Alaska Office of Food Security, which she hadn’t, and described the executive committee of the Permanent Fund as “12 men” who are “all politicians” who have to be reminded the Fund’s objective is to maximize financial returns.
Chaos followed. Someone at the Permanent Fund leaked emails suggesting that Ellie was pushing Fund investments towards her friends and her father’s business, and Ellie resigned from the board with her spokesman telling the Alaska Beacon that she was spending too much time on Fund business and needed to focus on Manna Tree.
Manna Tree’s pitch is that “the food system is broken,” but that investors can fix it.
“The way we eat could fundamentally shift to healthier options if innovative food companies scale fast enough to reach mainstream consumers and subsequently be acquired by Big Food,” it says on its website. “Piece by piece, each young food brand acquisition could introduce a new food concept, a new niche market, a different supply chain and possibly regenerative agricultural processes that could shift broader market dynamics and allow big food companies to reshape their portfolios with brands and companies that are aligned with modern food values of Millennial and Generation Z.
“The upshot: innovative companies, by the hundreds, can fundamentally shift how and what we eat.”
Shifting and shiftiness was something of a norm around the Rogoff-Rubensteins, but it was a fun time before Alice started to take herself seriously. She could be largely ignored at the Alaska Dispatch, an online operation that Hopfinger convinced her she didn’t have the technological experience or knowledge to run.
But the newspaper was different. Alice had grown up with newspapers, was confident she could run one of those, and found flunkies happy to follow her orders. With their help, she managed to run the newspaper right into the ground.
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” the now long gone author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
Alice was born into the world of the rich. Sanberg appears to have battled his way into that world as did Weaver. But you can’t help but wonder whether it matters how people got there because most of them still seem to become, as Firtzgeland put it, “different” and “cynical” and more.
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Categories: Commentary
So you got to attend one of the early Reykjavik conferences! That’s when Alice was actually running it; she seems to be much more on the sidelines now but what do I know – I could never afford to be there. Will say the Arctic Circle is one of Alice’s ideas that has done quite well. Her vision of the Arctic coming to mean more and more in the coming years has come true. I’ve said this before: Do wish you’d write a book about the Years of Alice. And is Elle still in town or has she drifted off? Did Alice’s lakefront home ever sell? It was for sale for the longest time.
The Campbell Lake estate was reported at one point to have sold, but it still appears to be in Alice’s name. She’s paying the muni taxes on it at least. Ellie looks to have left the state in the wake of the Permanent Fund kerfuffle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is gone.
Don’t forget how Ted Stevens & David Rubenstein pulled off the “Great Eskimo Tax Scam” with the invention of the native corporations we see today throughout AK.
Also, Alice never wanted ADN or journalism in AK to be “successful” that’s not what venture capitalists do…she bought a failing company (used it for a tax write off) and sold off anything of value like its building, press, etc. We are in the Oligarch stage of Empire & her and David are sitting in the front row watching it collapse.
When I was a boy, a group of men were standing around in my father’s garage “one upping” each other about all the write offs they had that tax year. My father was under a car working on it. He rolled out from under the vehicle on his creeper, let out an exasperated breath and said, ” I don’t want you men misleading my son. Ler’s go outside”. The men followed us out to the gravel driveway. My dad “dug” two holes with his shoe in the gravel. He started tossing dollar bills into each “hole”. He then said, “The hole on the left is taxes; the one on the right is write offs. None of the money is in my pocket. Pick up the money, Marlin”.